David leaned back in his chair, the office swivel squeaking in protest. The test results. Finally. He'd always felt misplaced. His family, content with their simple lives, their predictable routines. He, on the other hand, craved adventure, excitement. He knew he'd find something special.

He wasn't surprised when he found out that his ancestors were famed explorers. He allowed himself a small, satisfied sigh. The validation was a sweet balm. He would go traveling immediately.

He imagined the looks on his friends' faces when he told them. He was so excited he could barely sit still. He had to go tell his mother right away.

Emotion: smug

Cluster: Positive / Joy
PC1 (Valence): 3.43 Positive
PC2 (Disposition): 1.71

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion smug. During extraction, it was fed through Gemma4-31B and its hidden state activations were captured at 11 layers.

The mean activation across all 1,000 smug stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the smug emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the smug vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
de1.109
l0.615
la0.585
😎0.570
😉0.564
Suppressed:
S-0.579
own-0.486
💔-0.483
😞-0.464
😣-0.455